Building A Gaming PC? AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Is Flirting With An All-Time Low Price
If you read our AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review, then you already know that it's one of the best options to build a gaming PC around. That was true last November when we put the chip through its paces, presuming you could find it in stock and at MSRP, and it's even more true now, with a price cut bringing it down to one of its lowest prices ever.
Over on Amazon, you can score the Ryzen 7 9800X3D for $449.15 (6% off). Sure, it's not a massive discount by any stretch. But the bang-for-buck proposition was already decent, and this new discount brings the chip down close to its all-time low price of $441.94, which it briefly hit last April and again in June, according to price tracking data site CamelCamelCamel.
This is also the least expensive Zen 5 processor to sport AMD's second-generation 3D V-Cache. The big change for this round is that AMD relocated the 3D V-Cache (an additional 64MB in this case) to below the processor, which puts the core complex die (CCD) closer to whatever cooling solution is being used.
The upshot to going this route is that the CPU cores no longer radiate heat through the cache to the cooler, which in turns enables higher clock speeds. It's also the reason why AMD enabled full overclocking controls on the Zen 5 chips with 3D V-Cache, which wasn't the case on Zen 4 and Zen 3 variants like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Ryzen 7 5800X3D, respectively.
Beyond the 96MB of L3 cache (32MB on-die and 64MB of stacked cache), this is an 8-core/16-thread chip with a 4.7GHz base clock and up to a 5.2GHz boost clock. It also features two integrated graphics cores clocked at 2.2GHz, though realistically, you should be pairing this part with a discrete GPU.
Here are a few more discounted 3D V-Cache CPUs...
Both the Ryzen 9000X3D and 7000X3D series require a socket AM5 motherboard. You can find several of those on sale as well, such as MSI's MAG X870 Tomahawk for $289.99 (19% off) and Gigabyte's X870 Eagle WiFi7 for $229.99 (10% off). And if you're looking for a white-themed motherboard, check out Gigabyte's X870 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice for $289.99 (9% off).
